Poor Oona—she’s always the last duck to the pond…. But then her frog friend Roy reminds her: you’re good with gizmos… And so Oona the duck goes to work in the barn on her gizmos, pouring her creative and determined self into getting to the pond before the faster ducks.

Given the disparities between the lifespans of whites, African Americans, Native Americans and other groups, it might seem to be sensible to gear medicine along racial lines. But sociologist Leslie Hinkson argues that it represents a dangerous turn in science and healthcare. She discusses race, biology, and debt.

Growing up on a farm in northern Minnesota, Beatrice Ojakangas learned to cook and bake on a wood-burning stove before she could read. Today she’s a James Beard Hall of Fame author and an expert on Scandinavian baking. In “Breakfast with Beatrice,” she returns to her Finnish roots for an exploration of the day’s most important meal.

Shotwell persuasively encourages her reader to accept that purity is a myth, and that if we want to live better lives--that is to say, more just lives, but also qualitatively better ones in a world that seems to be politically and environmentally deteriorating all around us--we ought to reject this myth in favor of the impure.

It was one of the greatest children’s literature exhibits in my lifetime, and yet it produced no catalog. How is that possible? How did NYPL manage to create its most popular exhibit in its history, and yet it left no trace in the world?